Report Card #2 – The Editorial Process

(These are a few notes Bill made to sharpen what he thinks of as his wits on the way down to the Poetry Book Fair on Saturday October 17th. He was on a panel with Choman Hardi, Ron Villanueva, and Sophie Mayer, hosted by Fiona Moore, discussing political poetry and poetry politics.)

The crisis you encounter as an editor of a daily blog of political poetry is the same as the one you face as a writer of poetry at all: how do you escape the confirmation bias of preaching to the converted, what Facebook has conveniently identified as your circle? How do you burst the poetry bubble of people who already do that sort of thing?

Most of us – poets especially – find ourselves irresistible. Our ego loves our beliefs, and thinks them all both reasonable and good. Some of us have Opinions About Things – in which case we should remember Wilde’s remark ‘Most people are other people’, ie are you sure that opinion is actually yours? Some of us have marvellous systems which answer all our questions for us while allowing us to display our knowledge of said system – mansplainers, Londonsplainers, Marxsplainers, alike, all have answers a-go-go, usually to a different question from the one you asked.

What most of us share is a passive relationship to an active if frequently unarticulated ideology. Poetry is one of the ways we wake up to that.

When I was speed re-reading Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria for my intro to New Boots, one sentence from his discussion of Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis’ caught and held my attention: ‘The reader is forced into too much action to sympathise with the merely passive.’

Coleridge is making a point about how a good poet dramatises the act of reading poetry, so that it’s not just hard work, but engaging and energising as much as it is immersive and persuasive. He’s opposing this to just that opinionising or systematist aspect of the self, if not also to a consumerist, ‘entertain us’ attitude in the reader. This rang a loud familiar bell for me.

The lyric poem like the song from which it derives, often seems inadequate to the demands of the political because it encourages precisely that passivity, the act of overhearing something perhaps a little too familiar – yeah, yeah, you love/hate him/her/it. We know. Its mode, if not always its content, discourages us from independent thought, as though it were the PowerPoint of poetic discourses.

What we found we were opposing to this still dominant mode in poetry in English was a kind of editorial polystylism, an acceptance of a whole series of rhetorical tactics that, collectively, dramatised the act of reading the blog.

One day might be a found poem based on the Smith Commission’s report on Scottish independence, another might be a pastiche of a Poundian economic canto, another might be – yes – a lyric poem. Every day became a way of considering Hugh MacDiarmid’s interesting assertion ‘…all poetry that is not pure/propaganda, is impure propaganda for sure’.

Elegy, squib, ephemera, parable – we were assembling a set of rhetorical categories that could be political. Now, the idea that this expanded taxonomy might replace the consensus that a poem is a lyrical, personal, anecdotal, epiphanic event might be pretty utopian, but at least it gave us something to build on from day to day.

Poetry, we realised we were asserting, is a way of, first, wakening up to and, second, resisting your own inherent and inevitable ideological standpoint.

Why? Because of its intense focus on words themselves, their opacity in terms of rhythmic, musical, imagistic texture, their etymologies, their cultural and historical and political specificity. The act of moving back and forth from this microcosm to a macrocosm, looking across a range of poetic modes, causes writer, editor, and – possibly – reader, to reconsider in political as well as cultural terms the key question asked by the Scottish poet W.S. Graham: ‘What is the language using us for?’

Share this:

Like this:

New Boots – the Anthology!

A selection of 100 poems from the project is now available in book form from Smokestack (price £8.99) - go here to order.

"Why the devil I throw my money away for that which the blockheads wish?" (G.F. Handel)

Welcome poets, polemicists and the disbelieving masses

The 2015 General Election made manifest the great sea-change that had been occurring in UK politics over the last fifteen to twenty years. Previous certainties, like Labour’s Scottish hegemony, are no more. Older patterns, like Conservative dominance of England, reasserted themselves.

The idea of the UK as a single country has been replaced by a plurality of identities, some long known to the other countries and regions, others formulating themselves as time passes. For that reason, we thought it might be an interesting experiment to chart the responses of those unacknowledged legislators, the poets, over the first 100 days of the new dispensation.

We ended up publishing a poem a day for 138 days, each one responding to some aspect of the new unrealpolitik. We then set to editing a book of 100 poems in order to, as we thought then, conclude the project.

However, the results of the EU Referendum showed that the slow slew in British political identity toward disillusionment and division had reached a breaking point that made even more evident the contrasts already indicated by the Scottish referendum and the General Election. We felt we had to begin again...

Stay with us, and see what the hell happens next. Oh fuck, it's Trump.

Commissioning and Contributions

This site is maintained by self-appointed voluntary arts drones working on zero hours non-contracts. Therefore we simply can't process unsolicited work, and will have to proceed initially at least by invitations. We hope we've got enough sense to ask *you* for a contribution, but please don't be offended if we're so stupid, tired or disempowered that we haven't approached you yet.